Torri Higginson

One of Canada's leading actors — and a familiar face internationally through her roles in the TekWar franchise, the Academy Award winning movie The English Patient and the miniseries Stephen King's Storm of the Century — Torri Higginson now brings to Stargate Atlantis the same talent and intensity that earned her a Gemini Award for Best Actress - Drama for the Canadian hit series The City.

Born in Burlington, Ontario, the enterprising Higginson created her own earliest screen role as the star and executive producer of the 23-minute short The Photographer's Wife, made through a Netherlands company created to encourage young filmmakers. She broke into episodic TV with a 1992 episode of Forever Knight and went on to appear in the telefilms The Women of Windsor and Family Pictures before landing the role of beautiful scientist Beth Kittridge in William Shatner's TekWar TV-movies. She reprised the role in the first several episodes of the subsequent series.

After co-starring in the futuristic action film Jungleground (1995), she appeared in The English Patient as Mary, the nurse who, as Higginson puts it, didn't blow up. Higginson went on to major roles in such action and SF movies as Memory Run a.k.a. Synapse (1996), Airborne (1998), Charles Bronson's Family of Cops III TV-movie (1999) and the miniseries Stephen King's Storm of the Century (1999). Then came her breakthrough as lawyer and Toronto socialite Katharine Strachan Berg in the gritty CTV telefilm and series The City (seen in the U.S. as Deep in the City).

Other works include the films Rats, Turning Paige, Irish Eyes and Crust, the Stephen King short Autopsy Room Four and guest appearances on series including Highlander: The Raven, The Outer Limits (the episode Haven), the docudrama miniseries Canada: A People's History and the women's-erotica anthology Bliss.

Her theater work includes Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize-winning Three Tall Women, Zadie's Shoes, The Mill on the Floss, Phyllis Nagy's Weldon Rising and Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile. The proud owner of a dog named Addy Twiggy Chicken Legs Killer and a cat named Shaka Zulu Gumbo Yaya, Higginson counts among her avocations exotic travel — which last year included a 7,500-foot climb up Mount Sinai in Egypt as well as "an amazing and grueling 10-day hiking trek through mountainous Chiang Mai province in northern Thailand to visit a number of hill-tribe villages."